#SXSW Case Study. What twitter #tag reveal about your social campaigns?

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1 #SXSW Case Study What twitter #tag reveal about your social campaigns? SXSW is an interactive and music event organized every year in Austin. This year ObjectiveMarketer decided to tap into the users twitter streams around the #SXSW event. ObjectiveMarketer also created an interactive portal at for user interaction such as view trending topics, retweets and recently posted images. The users could also retweet/share from the interface. This report is focused on some of the findings from the data thus collected, and analyzed.

2 "The fact that anyone listens to what you have to say is a big deal" #sxsw Activity Most tweets were from the users with friend/followers count at around 10,000. Virality Users with higher number of twitter followers get more retweets. However if the friends count is less than the Key Findings followers count, it effects the retweets negatively. Retweets are not effected by how long back the twitter account was created. Content Tweets with Images or rich media received fewer retweets Longer tweets were more likely to be retweeted. Optimal length is anything above characters. Campaign Planning The most active time for tweeting in the conference was from noon to evening However, Retweets were not as spread out as the tweets, most of the retweets were only happening in the noon Audience There were a broad set of people in SXSW, with very different background and interest. There were some 2

3 interesting co-relation between users bio, and retweetability. Males outnumbered females by 2:1 ratio 3

4 Method The data was collected for the period of 14 th March to 22 nd March using twitter-streaming APIs. The search was looking for #SXSW tag in the tweets. Twitter #tags are increasingly used by brands/organizations to run contests/campaigns. The report highlights the importance of analyzing the participants in the #tag campaign, and based of that actively modifying the campaign to meet the goals. "In 2009 more data was generated by individuals than the entire history of mankind through " #sxsw There were approximately 45k unique participants in the SXSW conversations, creating more than 200k unique tweets. These tweets were self identified tweets (appended with #sxsw). There were other conversations around sxsw that were not identifiable directly (no hashtag used), and these were not captured by this study. (continued) 4

5 The involvement was high with an average of 4-5 tweets created per user. SXSW is a focused high-energy event. Most people attending the event are both cutting with respect to the technology and aggressive with goals, and therefore it is expected that the crowd will have a lot of twitter users. In SXSW the Involvement was high, with an average of 4-5 unique tweets created by each user around #SXSW. Followers Most active twitter users were with follower base of around 10,000. Involvement Note, we have normalized for the population distribution. So what we see is that users with 10,000 followers are 5 times more likely to participate in the event twitter stream than users with 100,000 followers. Friends The most active twitter users were with friend count of about 10,000. But there is not much difference in activity level for users with higher or lower follower counts. However there is a cutoff of 100 friends, anyone with less than 100 friends there was negligible activity. Takeway If you are recruiting users for a campaign, ignore users with less than 100 friends. 5

6 Status The users who were actively tweeting in sxsw were people who had tweets in the range of ,000. The activity level of the users with fewer tweets was high, but it was sprodaic. In most likely case they were either selfpromoting, or tweeting around specific event. Takeway It is not always necessary that people who are heavy twitter users will be the most active twitterers for your campaign. Through the campaign keep an eye on the trends, and based of that fine tune your strategy. 6

7 Twitter is not a social network. Its an information network that helps people with sharing & discovery (@ev at #SXSW) Retweets Twitter engagement and effectiveness of the content and conversation can be measured effectively by number of retweets generated. More number of retweets generally indicates a highly engaged audience. Understanding your key influencers, and motivating them to share your messages should be integral part of the campaign design. Tools like ObjectiveMarketer help you find your influencer around keywords, topics #tags. Most Retweeted Users These were the 25 most retweeted users: Twitter Handle Total Retweets anywhere 1036 ev 730 sxsw 601 clear_events 301 garyvee 266 mashable 248 SXSWPartyList 233 InvisiblePeople 220 twitter 182 ScrewYouSXSW 178 jeffjarvis 163 brainpicker 156 omarg 127 hardlynormal 125 PerezHilton 122 aplusk 116 jeffpulver AmericanApparel SXSWFreeNOMS 112 blackjoelewis 106 foursquare 105 dspark 103 LAWeekly 103 chrisbrogan 102 7

8 "There are 2 kinds if people on Twitter. Those who want more followers & those who #sxsw Retweets seems to be strongly co-related to number of followers. Higher followership did not guarantee higher retweets, but higher retweets required higher number of followers. Retweets-Followers Follower Friend Ratio Follower to Friend ratio matters for retweetability. The tweet is less likely to get retweets if the user had lower number of followers than the friends. Interestingly, if the friends count are higher than followers count, the retweets is not entirely zero. There are some retweets. This can be attributed to the fact that genuinely interesting posts will get retweets irrespective of the person who tweeted it first. However the number of retweets are significantly more when the follower/friend ration is >= 1. Discoverability is a big problem in twitter, and therefore it always helps to have more number of followers.

9 Tweets with images are less likely to be shared. The tweets with image links in them received lower retweets than the tweets without the image links. The retweets for tweets without image was close to 31.6%, vs. when there was image it was only 16.8%. The result can be explained because most of the images shared were of personal in nature, e.g. snaps from events, and these were less likely shareable compared to general tweet about the sessions or sxsw. Also unlike Facebook in twitter image or rich media is not directly available for interaction, the user needs to click out of the twitter to go to some external site. This therefore Image - Retweets can be hindrance to retweet goals. Takeway Embedding multimedia content, such as image may not be as effective on twitter as it is on Facebook. Plan for how it may or may not affect your retweet goals, if you are sharing images. 100% 80% 60% 40% 20% Retweets Total 0% Images All 9

10 Tweets are shared more, if the length of the tweet is more than 80 characters. Tweet Length - Retweets a. Tweets smaller than length 20 are almost never retweeted. Makes sense, as 20 characters are hardly 3-4 words (not worthy of retweets) b. Tweets with length are sparingly retweeted; notice how the curve has dropped significantly for that range. c. 80+ characters have pretty good chance of getting re-tweeted. d. Interesting the retweets do not drop after 120 characters. Tweets with length more than 120 characters do not leave room for retweet text. But seems like it does not hurt the retweets. We however recommend keeping the length of text less than 120 characters, as it helps in keeping meaning of the tweet intact after retweet. 10

11 Most tweets happening between 12:30PM 3:00PM Most Active Time SXSW is a party event, with lot of late night events, but seemingly most tweet activities were around usual working time of 10 AM 3PM with the peak happening around 12:30 1 PM. Retweets followed tweets by about 30min to 1hr. Interestingly retweets did not happen all through the day, most retweets happened around 1PM, and it dropped more drastically compared to the drop in number of tweets. People were tweeting more towards evening then in morning. Most of the SXSW crowd was sleeping during 12 AM- 5AM. Takeway Tweets/Retweets can have different activity peaks. For a successful campaign understand and plan around the peak activity. 11

12 Common terms involving the users participating in the SXSW conversation Social Media, pop culture, Creative Director, Real Estate, Public Relations, User Experience, graphic designer, Web Developer, Hip Hop, Community Manager There were about 186 real estate agents, or people with interest in real estate, and there were about 250 PR folks. It is interesting how diverse the group was at SXSW, from social media, graphic designers all the way to real estate folks. Most Common words that occurs on the User Profile description social, marketing, digital, director, designer, writer. Design, technology, business, blogger, creative, entrepreneur, student, manager, founder, developer, people, husband Again notice how varied the group is from blogger, writer, creative to business, founder, developer. Occurrence of husband term prompted us to look if Cross-pollinate learning from #tag twitter campaigns to other digital marketing efforts such as SEO. there is some trend for male/female demography. We found that Total number of users with Father or Husband in their bio was more than 2k. whereas the number of users with Mother or Wife in their bio was only 1k. So the men exceeded women by 2:1 ratio. 12

13 What about the people, who got retweeted, is there something about their description that is different? These are the most common words found in the description of folks who got retweeted Social, marketing, twitter, blogger, digital, anywhere, people, director, editor, technology, founder, cofounder, design, writer, community, online, strategist, author, creative The people who dropped out of the first list are business, entrepreneur, student, developer, husband. These are the people who were likely to be creating a lot of content, but not retweeted. It seems like always pushing messages is not the best way to get retweeted. You can use twitter audience profile to find the geodemographics of your user base. The folks who were not in the first list but made into the retweets list are strategist, author, editor, co-founder, anywhere. They created less content, but got retweeted more often. Where did the SXSW participant come from? Central Time (US & Canada) Eastern Time (US & Canada) Pacific Time (US & Canada) Mountain Time (US & Canada) London Alaska Amsterdam Hawaii Brasilia 13

14 URL Linked to the Profiles Facebook Linkedin Myspace Blogs Almost equal numbers of people were linking to either of the social network profiles. However, significantly more numbers of people were linking to some sort of blog. 1 Takeaway User Profile Knowing where the users reside on different social networks, you can fine tune your other social media campaigns to reach the user base. Very small % of people, (0.6%) were linking using short URL bit.ly to track clicks on the referenced URL. Do users with older accounts get more retweets? 14

15 Red is the age of the users who were retweeted, green is age of all the users. There is no shift in the distribution, so it can be safely assumed it does not matter how long you have been active on twitter for retweets. People like to write long tweets. There is a peak of retweeted users for very old joiners. These probably are the social media celebrities who also happen to join very early, but for more general users it did not matter how long back they created the twitter account. Length of Description Average length of the bio is 77 characters. It is really small, and maybe guided with general briefness on twitter. People do not seem to be writing long bios on twitter, with a high % of blank bios. 15

16 "Making something that is public more public is a violation of privacy" danah boyd #SXSW #sxswsa Protected Users There were only 450 users who had protected their tweets. Verified Users There were only 120 verified accounts (less than 0.2% of total participants.) Average Tweet Length Average length of the tweets: 102 characters. There is tendency towards writing longer messages, notice the sharp rise of the curve at the right corner. 16

17 19% of the users were not using any clients. There were 437 unique twitter clients being used, of which only 30 had twitter in their name Twitter Clients No Client Clients Top 15 Twitter Clients Used Twitter Client Updates web TweetDeck Tweetie Echofon 8102 Technical Data API 7450 UberTwitter 7426 HootSuite 7118 Seesmic 5247 Twitterrific 4221 txt 2706 mobile web 2602 twitterfeed 2412 twidroid 2042 foursquare 1326 TwitPic 1118 A lot of the updates were happening from mobile devices, but Tweetdeck/web were still accounting for majority of the updates. 17

18 Twitter provides great opportunity to learn about your target market. About Us ObjectiveMarketer is a social media marketing firm based out of Redwood City, CA. Agencies and business user use ObjectiveMarketer s social media management suite to execute campaigns on social channels such as Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. ObjectiveMarketer provides strong analytical platform that helps clients not only execute but also identify, understand and interact with the influencers/amplifiers on these social channels. Additionally ObjectiveMarketer provides custom solution for creating data based landing pages for twitter streams around events or keywords e.g. This report is one of the reports that ObjectiveMarketer can provide their clients to help understand the demography, and behavioral profile of the twitter users engaging with the brands on Twitter. If you want to similar report for your business, or want to get help with campaign or social media use strategies please us at info@objectivemarketer.com. 18